As electronic devices become a greater part of daily life, the amount of electronic content distributed to users, and accessed, via electronic devices, continues to rise. For instance, users now regularly employ their mobile electronic devices (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, etc.) to access electronic content from anywhere network connectivity is present, and at any convenient time. However, as the content provider landscape becomes more competitive, individual content providers may struggle to keep users engaged with their own electronic content as often and as long as they would like to engage users.
Gamification of websites is a known strategy for driving user engagement with electronic content. However, existing gamification techniques are typically agnostic to the users that make up an online community. For instance, all users of an online community may be uniformly given the same games in hopes that some or all of the users will remain engaged with associated electronic content more often and for longer periods of time. In practice, this does not effectively engage a user community, as many users are disinterested in the gamification features employed by a website.
Furthermore, in today's content distribution environment, content providers are often unable to obtain accurate impression data with respect to their content when that content is distributed by third party entities that control the distribution channel(s) of the content. For example, a content provider that contracts with a third party entity to have its own content provided on the third party entity's social networking site has no way of knowing the number of times its content has been accessed or viewed by users of the social networking site. This is primarily due to the fact that the third party entities who own and/or control these types of distribution channels often do not readily share impression data with other entities who do not own or control the distribution channel(s) (in this case the social networking site). In fact, for some types of distribution channels, such as a television broadcast, it may be infeasible for the owner/operator of the broadcast media to obtain accurate impression data at the customer level.